Mohawks on the Nile - Carl Benn

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the Second Cataract.”

      In 1884, Canada was a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, occupying most of its current land mass after having expanded enormously following the 1867 confederation of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the United Province of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec). In that modernizing Victorian country of four and a half million people, telegraph lines provided rapid communication between its capital of Ottawa, its other major centres, and a good portion of the rest of the North American continent. Even much of the world beyond stood within a few hours’ reach because of the transatlantic cable, which had been laid across the ocean floor from Ireland to Newfoundland in 1866, and which allowed people to connect to other parts of the globe using lines emanating from Europe. On August 20, 1884, the Colonial Office at the imperial centre in London sent a cablegram across the Atlantic to Canada’s governor general, Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, fifth marquess of Lansdowne. Because of the time of year, the message — in cipher — reached him at his summer residence within the Quebec Citadel instead of his primary home at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.1 Decoded, the note said, in part, “it is proposed to endeavour to engage three hundred good voyageurs from Caughnawaga, Saint Regis, and Manitoba as steersmen in boats for Nile expedition — engagement for six months with passage to and from Egypt.”2 Eight days later, London sent another cablegram, increasing the request to five hundred men.3

      The “Caughnawaga” and “Saint Regis” mentioned in the cablegram were Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) territories with mostly Mohawk (or Kanienkehaka) populations on the Saint Lawrence River. Today we generally know them as Kahnawake and Akwesasne (and in the end, a third Mohawk community, Kanesatake, or Oka, on the Ottawa River, also contributed men for service in Africa). Imperial officials intended the reference to Manitoba to indicate native rather than white river pilots from that part of the country, although the aboriginal people who came from there were not Iroquois, being Saulteaux Ojibways instead. The British government needed skilled voyageurs to guide whaleboats full of troops and supplies through the perilous cataracts of the Nile River in Egypt’s rebellious province of Sudan. The objective of the expedition was to rescue one of the heroes of the age, Major-General Charles Gordon, who had begun the sixth month of his defence of the provincial capital of Khartoum against thousands of Muslim nationalists led by a man known to his followers as “the Mahdi.” About two weeks after Lord Lansdowne received London’s request, his military secretary, Gilbert Elliot, Viscount Melgund, travelled to Kahnawake to join a Canadian militia officer in recruiting Mohawks. Then, on September 15, 1884, three-and-a-half weeks after the Colonial Office had sent the first note, the “Canadian Voyageur Contingent” sailed from Quebec City on what would be a remarkable journey for its members as they participated in the campaign to save General Gordon.4 In the end, the expedition would fail: the whaleboats would not reach Khartoum, the city would fall, Gordon would be beheaded, and Britain would abandon most of Sudan to the nationalists until the latter 1890s. Despite the army’s lack of success, the story of the Mohawk journey to Sudan is a good one that can capture our imagination and reveal much about the Iroquois world. It also presents us with an opportunity to consider how native people in eastern North America faced the challenges and opportunities of modernization as well as their relations with the larger world within frameworks that both emerged from and protected indigenous cultural values. Additionally, the story of the Mohawk boatmen, placed within the contexts of Britain’s intervention in the Arab world and the shared experiences of the Canadian Voyageur Contingent, reminds us that aboriginal history, if it is to be comprehensive, often ought to be understood within broad settings beyond the narrower realms that tend to structure scholarly inquiry about the First Nations.

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      The call for Mohawks and Ojibways to pilot boats up the Nile River through the desert, in what contemporaries called the “Soudan War,” was inspired by the British army’s Colonel William Butler, who promoted the idea to the man who would lead the “Gordon Relief Expedition,” General Baron Wolseley. Like many others in the Victorian military, Butler and Wolseley had served in different parts of the world, gaining experience that informed their thoughts as they pursued their careers and the interests of the empire. These two soldiers (and some of their fellow officers who would participate in the Nile campaign) had spent time in Canada, where they had encountered expert river pilots — many of whom were aboriginal — during the Red River Rebellion. Late in 1869, shortly after the dominion had assumed sovereignty over the vast western and northern interior regions of the continent, but fifteen years before Lansdowne received the cablegram from the Colonial Office and sixteen years before the Canadian Pacific Railway connected central Canada to British Columbia, rebellion had broken out in today’s Manitoba, led by the famous Métis visionary, Louis Riel. Once the snows cleared in the spring of 1870, Garnet Wolseley (then a colonel) led eleven hundred Canadian militia volunteers and British regular soldiers from Ontario to Manitoba to assert the government’s authority. Wolseley achieved his objective without the loss of a single man en route, and without bloodshed at his destination, as Riel and his followers had fled before the advanced elements of the expedition approached the rebel stronghold of Upper Fort Garry in today’s Winnipeg. Butler, then a lieutenant, had gone ahead of the rest of the force to gather intelligence (and even had interviewed Riel during the days of the rebel leader’s provisional government) and had seen what the best Canadian and First Nations boatmen could do on the lakes and rivers of the continent’s interior. After the rebellion, Butler reported on conditions in western Canada, and in response to his recommendations Ottawa formed the North-West Mounted Police in 1873 to bring law and order to the region. He also published a popular book in 1872 on the Canadian west, The Great Lone Land. Like several other senior officers in Egypt who had served with Wolseley in Canada (and later in the Second Ashanti War of 1873–74 in West Africa), Butler became part of Wolseley’s “Ring.” This was a group of individuals who the general collected around himself because of his need for capable staff officers at a time when the British army did not produce enough men with the necessary qualifications for that kind of work. As a member of the Ring, Butler was in a good position to promote the idea of engaging Canadian boatmen on the Nile to Wolseley’s sympathetic ear.

      Moving Wolseley’s troops and supplies along the first half of the two-thousand-kilometre route, from Toronto on Lake Ontario to Prince Arthur’s Landing (now Thunder Bay) on Lake Superior, was comparatively easy because the army could use railways in the populous regions of southern Ontario and steamships on the upper Great Lakes. However, the long journey from Prince Arthur’s Landing to Fort Garry was much more difficult because it ran mainly through a forested wilderness largely without roads in a region with few resources to support the expedition. (There was a better route to the seat of rebellion, via rail through American territory to Minnesota, from which the march to Manitoba would be easier, but President Ulysses Grant would not allow British and Canadian troops to travel through the United States, and his government belligerently delayed one of the expedition’s steamers at the American lock at Sault Sainte Marie between lakes Huron and Superior.) Wolseley solved the problem of getting from Prince Arthur’s Landing to Upper Fort Garry primarily by employing small boats along the region’s waterways, as would be the case along much of the Nile in the 1880s. That part of the journey in 1870 involved carrying supplies around forty-seven portages and running eighty kilometres of rapids, which the force accomplished through utilizing the piloting skills of boatmen or voyageurs. These individuals typically worked in the fur trade, rafted timber, guided travellers, or most commonly laboured as forwarders who moved goods along the country’s rivers and lakes in small boats, especially where schooners and steamers could not go in the years before railways and roads came to dominate most of the country’s communications lines. Canoes of aboriginal design or inspiration had been employed for generations — including large freight canoes — but from the 1700s onwards people increasingly adopted wooden bateaux and other small craft. On the Red River Expedition, the army used a variety of keel boats, averaging somewhat less than ten metres in length. Each vessel generally had two voyageurs to perform the tasks of bowman and steersman, along with eight or nine soldiers to pull the oars under their supervision. When necessary, everyone

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